In conversation with Marty Moss-Coane, host of Radio Times on WHYY

Leslie Jamison is the author of the bestselling essay collection The Empathy Exams, a personal and probing look at pain and how we understand others’ suffering, praised for “its ethical generosity, the palpable sense of stretch and reach” and “the lovely vividness of the language itself (The New York Times Book Review). She is also the author of the novel The Gin Closet, a columnist for The New York Times Book Review, and a professor of nonfiction writing at Columbia University. In her new book, Jamison synthesizes memoir, literary criticism, and cultural history in a reinvention of the addiction and recovery memoir.